Tag Archives: Bread Loaf School of English

In June 2015, Middlebury College and the Vermont Land Trust, with the support of Louis Bacon ’79, signed a conservation easement forever protecting Middlebury’s 2,100 acre Bread Loaf campus. A photo exhibit in the Davison Library for the summer celebrates this initiative. Photographs by Brett Simison and stories from people involved in the conservation project illustrate not only the campus’s natural beauty, but also its literary lineage, ecological diversity, and imaginative space. This exhibit helps explain why Bread Loaf is a landmark place, and celebrates its perpetual protection. We invite you to come see these photos, read the stories, and think about why Bread Loaf is important to you.

Begin your research, searching for articles across both databases and MIDCAT (the library catalog) with Summon.

The music collection has moved into the Davis Family Library, link here to view a map depicting the updated location of materials.

Study Carrel Suites have been set aside for use by specific Language Schools; individual carrels within the Language Suites are available on a first come, first served basis and may not be reserved; the Language Suites are intended for the exclusive use of the language specified. MAP

A change in Summer Hours for Special Collections on the Lower Level of the Davis Family Library was approved by the LIS Area Directors at their recent meeting. The following hours will be in effect immediately:

On Tuesday May 31st we’re going to change the categories on this blog, so if by any chance you’re using a feed of a specific category, that’s going to break. We suggest subscribing to the whole blog for maximum enjoyment! If you’re not a LIS staff member & would like to filter out the more staff related posts, you can subscribe to the new “Middlebury Community Interest” category after May 31st. The other categories will be “LIS Staff Interest”, and “Post for MiddPoints” which will cause the post to be added to the MiddPoints blog too. All the old categories except “The Essentials” will be converted to tags for easy searching.
The LIS Web team developed this new scheme, following recommendations that came out of the open meeting about the future of the LIS Blog (including a call for simplified categories). The AD Team reviewed and approved these changes. We welcome your comments.

For many years, the Bread Loaf School of English has been using a mail/conferencing system called FirstClass. FirstClass was one of the first ‘bulletin boards’ to develop a graphic user interface and the BLSE has used this technology for mail, course conferences, support of the Bread Loaf Teachers Network and general discussion conferences. Until last May, the server running the FirstClass server software was located on campus and supported by the Enterprise and Network Solutions group.

Last May, LIS decided to outsource the administration and support of this server to WhatIf Networks, a company based in Westbrook, ME that has years of experience supporting FirstClass servers. The cut over of services took place just before the beginning of the 2010 BLSE summer sessions. At the conclusion of the summer classes, we began planning to upgrade the server to a newer version of the software, from version 8.0 to version 9.1. One of the driving factors in this decision was the increasing number of requests of the BreadNet community to access their mail and conferences from smart phones (particularly iPhones) and iPads. Our upgrade now makes this possible and we have a number of happy smart phone users.

However, to prepare for the upgrade, it was necessary to reconfigure the roughly 1000 user desktops so that the upgraded client view was clean and uncluttered. Caroline Eisner, the director of Breadnet; Margaret ‘Mugs’ Johnson of WhatIf Networks and Shel Sax worked over the weekend reconfiguring the user desktops in preparation for the upgrade. The upgrade was effected late Saturday afternoon, November 20th and the new software installed without incident

After the upgrade, a typical FirstClass client desktop looks like this:

When Middlebury first started using a Content Management System to organize its site in 2003 we added a local search engine for the site, operated by Atomz. This search engine wasn’t very popular, people weren’t finding the information they needed. At a meeting a couple years later, Barbara Merz remarked, “Why don’t we just get Google!?” So we purchased a Google Search Appliance (GSA) and set that up as our local search engine. Going into the Web Makeover Project, we thought we were safe on this subject. After all, the GSA was a Google project, it indexed all of our site’s content, we had put in Key Matches for the most relevant pages, people must be satisfied with this as our search engine.

Nope.

The Strategy

After “the font is too small” and “it’s too hard to edit”, search results were the top complaint about our old site during the web makeover’s requirements gathering phase. We heard that people got better results about our site from Google.com than they did from the GSA. The designers we worked with to build the new site proposed a solution in three parts: Continue reading →

The Identity Management (IDM) project seeks to organize our concept of a “person” or “identity” among our various systems (including Banner, the Active Directory, web-applications, hosted systems, and others). This project focuses on three facets of each identity: Continue reading →

What are you doing this semester? If it includes working on a project or research covering topics that potentially span multiple disciplines, We’d love to hear about it. You can get in touch by emailing middlab@middlebury.edu.

What is MiddLab?

MiddLab will be a new section of our website that helps push information about scholarly and service work up to the top. We know that there are a lot of greatacademicresources built by people at Middlebury and many ongoing projects and activities that not everyone hears about or gets to see. Continue reading →